Friday, 15 June 2007

Mid May 2007: Found Agency lost its Google Rankings

On the second week of May, The Found Agency, a Sydney SEO company, went from the 1st position in Google for the term 'search engine optimisation' to the 60 th position in a couple of days as a result of a penalty by Google for using 'black hat' link building practices. For the full story: Found Agency black listed by Google

Following that news, a couple of articles florished in Australian newspapers and on the blogosphere. The Found Agency commented on that with a poor PR strategy and the news lost its buzz...

Mid June 2007: A new website, and a serious drop in traffic volume

One month after their cahotic crisis management, the Found Agency comes back with a brand new website. They said goodbye to the yellow background and say hi to their new burgundy one... The website features their case studies for a couple of their clients, the usual content for a well optimised site for search engine marketing ( what is search engine marketing), a glossary and a 'resources' page, which I guess will be useful to build proper fresh links. The funny thing is the 'in the press' section, which obviously does not refer in any way to the bad press they got a couple of weeks ago... Fair enough, who would not do it anyway.

However another interesting finding is the evolution of their traffic since the upercut from Google. If you ever wonder if being first in the search engine has a strong effect on your traffic, i guess you have the answer. Indeed the graph below shows the average traffic on Found Agency website before (red line) before the drop in the ranking and after (green line). The traffic seriously dropped...

The scary thing however is that Google kept them in the sandbox as the Sydney SEO company does not even rank for their brand name. I am pretty interesting to see what will happen in the next few months.... To be continued.